More than five centuries after Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized the transmission of scientific information, the multibillion- dollar scientific publishing industry is quaking to two Bay Area-led revolts.

This month, a nonprofit venture founded by Nobel laureates with the help of a $9 million startup grant launched the first of two new scientific journals that will make all content freely available online. Print versions of the journals will be available for a subscription fee.

The goal of the initiative, called the Public Library of Science, is to force a new standard of "open public access" to scientific research, which, after all, is largely funded by taxpayer dollars. As it is now, scientific journals demand a hefty subscriber fee and limit online access to only those who pay. In another move, two prominent UCSF scientists called last week for a global boycott of six molecular biology journals, accusing the publisher, Reed Elsevier, the Goliath of science publishing, of charging exorbitant new subscription fees for online access.

The boycott, led by Keith Yamamoto, UCSF's vice dean for research, and Peter Walter, a professor of biophysics and biochemistry, appears to have touched a nerve. It quickly won the support of librarians, scientists and administrators throughout the University of California system.

Latest news videos

The high costs of online access are a fundamental threat to scholarship, because they prevent financially strapped scientists from learning what their colleagues are doing, said Daniel Greenstein, head of UC's California Digital Library. He is representing UC in its contract negotiations with the British- Dutch conglomerate Reed Elsevier.

Greenstein said the state's budget crisis makes it harder for UC libraries to afford journal access. "Given the California economy is so bad, it really brings (the issue) into stark relief," he said. Still, subscription rates are soaring so fast that "we begin to realize it's not just the economy; this would be an impossible (situation) even in good times."

Access isn't just a concern for doctors and scientists; it's a public health issue, as well, said Dr. Dorothy F. Bainton, vice chancellor of academic affairs at UCSF, who supports the boycott.

"Timely access to a broad range of current scientific publications is a necessity ... for both our clinicians, so that they may care for patients with the most up-to-date data, as well as our scientists who are making the breakthroughs in such areas as cancer, infectious, cardiovascular and neurological diseases," Bainton said.

The high cost of journals is a recurring problem. Anyone who browses UC's libraries can see relics of the impact of California's last financial bust a decade ago: On bookshelves, the volumes of some distinguished scholarly journals end in the early to mid-1990s.

In some cases, it's because the journals switched to online publication. Often, though, it's because librarians decided they simply couldn't afford any more costly subscriptions to a journal that had few readers, unlike "must- read" magazines such as Nature, Science, Cell, Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine.

The subscriptions crisis worsened in recent years due to the growing monopolization of the publishing industry. Fewer and fewer firms own more and more print and online magazines. Having devoured much of the competition, some scientific publishers feel free to sharply hike their subscription fees, scientists charge.

The UCSF-led boycott is focusing on six journals published by Cell Press, a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier. The best known is Cell, which acquired celebrity status in the late 20th century because it published groundbreaking research in genetics and AIDS research. The other targeted journals are Molecular Cell, Developmental Cell, Cancer Cell, Immunity and Neuron.

"Since 1998, UC has tried without success to reach a deal with Cell Press for electronic access" to the six journals at an affordable rate, said the letter that Yamamoto and Walter e-mailed to "colleagues and friends."

"It is untenable that a publisher would de facto block access of our published work even to our immediate colleagues," the letter states. "Cell Press is breaking an unwritten contract with the scientific community: Being a publisher of our research carries the responsibility to make our contributions publicly available at reasonable rates.

"As an academic community, it is time that we reassert our values," adds the letter, which claims that Cell Press "values profit above its academic mission."

The letter urges colleagues to take four actions: decline to review manuscripts for Cell Press journals; resign from Cell Press editorial boards; cease to submit papers to Cell Press journals; and "talk widely about Elsevier and Cell Press pricing tactics and business strategies."

So far, "we've gotten tremendous feedback from our colleagues," Walter said in a phone interview Friday. "We poked into something that resonates with the scientific community."

On Thursday, Cell Press President and CEO Lynne Herndon issued a statement saying that "we are negotiating with the California Digital Library for access to several Cell Press titles," and that the "discussions contain several misconceptions and we would like to clarify our position with the larger scientific and academic community."

She said the company is offering the UC system access to the six journals for $90,000 annually. The offer breaks down to roughly $1.50 per journal per year for each active user in the UC system, which she said "is an excellent value." "W appreciate the current budgetary constraints facing the UC library system, however, in fairness to our current customers we need to maintain our equitable pricing structure as it applies to all institutions," Herndon added.

Whatever the outcome of the Cell Press boycott, UCSF scientists are likely to be enthusiastic backers of the open-access journal, Public Library of Science, founded in part by their former colleague, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, who is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The other founders are Patrick Brown of Stanford and Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Working out of a cozy suite of offices overlooking the water at China Basin, the journal's science editors seek, vet and edit articles submitted by scientists from around the world. The editors launched PLoS Biology earlier this month and will follow with PLoS Medicine next year. Both can be accessed through their Web site at www.plos.org.

The effort has been bankrolled by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Instead of charging for access or subscriptions, PLoS is experimenting with a new business model that requires scientists to pay for publication as a final step in their research funding.

While its research articles are often highly technical, comprehensible mainly to professorsand graduate students, PLoS Biology contains easy-to-read synopses of each article's main points. Its editors hope to build a broad popular base in the general public and media.

"Our intention is to do something that fundamentally changes the way scientific research is communicated," said co-founder Brown.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.